


Professional Killer

by SenkoWakimarin



Series: Hell's Own Fury [1]
Category: The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Blood and Violence, Gen, Head Injury
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 17:49:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19234096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: Maria is not a professional killer.





	Professional Killer

**Author's Note:**

> Remember how I have absolutely no chill?
> 
> Someone has probably done this already, but here's my take on Maria being the Castle to survive and decide to Punish bad guys. Gonna be series, gonna update infrequently. This is rated M because there's no way in hell I would give this to kids to read, but it's not as graphic as some other violence-themed things I've done.

Maria is not a professional killer. 

When she was a girl, she’d thought soldiers, military men, were heroes. Her daddy was a soldier, and he’d been a tough-but-fair sonnovabitch, treated her and her brothers like they were a secondary squad under his command half the time, but hugged and kissed and praised them all when they did him proud. Her father had been a serious man, but a kind man. 

She’d thought all soldiers would be like him.

Her brothers went off to war. One came home strange and distant, moved to Montana and never called. She didn’t even know if he was still alive. The other came home in a box, and they planted that box in the ground, and everyone called him brave.

Maria had preferred him alive. Her brother’s funeral was the first time she really started doubting the logic of sending bright-eyed young men to fight drawn out wars over things that never quite made sense. Before, she’d almost intentionally never thought about it. She came from a military family. 

Hers was not to question. And the questions made her uneasy and angry, and there were no answers to those questions that could be the accepted and tolerate the life she was used to, and so instead of chasing them she’d let her brothers go and resolved not to give her heart to anymore men playing soldier.

And yet she’d married a Marine. 

She’d taken one look at Frank Castle, with his stupid guitar and his squinting, perpetually perplexed eyes, and she’d known she’d love him the rest of her days. Her days, which would surely outlast his. 

Daddy had approved of Frank the same way he’d disapproved of all her other boyfriends; immediately and without reservation. It wasn’t until their wedding reception that he’d said a single word against their union, and even then it had just been a few whispered words during their dance.

“That man will break your heart,” he’d said, spinning them slowly in place. “Men like him don’t break easy, but when they do, they break bad. And they hurt everyone around ‘em when they go.”

She’d thought she could keep him from breaking. Frank didn’t make close friends easy, didn’t let people in, but he’d let her in. She’d thought she could love him hard enough to keep him together.

Even when he started coming home strange, she’d thought they’d make it. 

Maria is not a professional killer. She was never a professional psychologist or a professional caregiver or a professional manager of other people. All she’d ever been was a woman doing her best; loving her husband, loving her kids, loving the moments, however rare, they were all able to be together. 

The first man she kills dies messily. She’d always been a good shot, hunted small game with her brothers in the woods upstate, hit the targets dead-on better than nine times of ten. Not perfect, and she’d never be quite the sniper Frank had been, but she knew her way around guns. All kinds of guns. 

It’s not her aim that’s the problem. 

Maria doesn’t particularly find any comfort in the suffering of others. But her aching head plays the sound of Lisa screaming when she’s close to sleep, Lisa screaming and the staccato of gunfire that followed; the brilliance of the lights, the smatter of gore. There’s a bullet in her brain that can’t be removed and it’s bleeding her out through a hole in her heart, and all she knows is anger. 

Everything is confused. She saw Frank shot in the head, saw her children mown down, Lisa trying to throw Junior out of the way. She’d been the baby, but taller than him. Lisa wanted to read books professionally when she grew up, such a strange and sweet dream. Maria remembers the sting and the explosion of pain in her own head, the certainty as she looked across the pavement at the red flower growing from where Frank’s left eye would never squint again that she would die.

Now she has a man collapsed in a folding chair, and he has a bullet hole in his shoulder, and he can’t scream because the hole in his shoulder punches down and toward the center of him, into his lungs which fill with blood. If she doesn’t shoot this man again, and shoot him cleaner, he will drown in his own blood.

This man sold guns to anyone who wanted to buy them. He’d sold her the gun she’d used to shoot him with, a week and a handful of days ago. He’d smiled as he’d taken her money and had shown her how to load and how to break the weapon down to clean it and laughed when she’d asked if cleaning it regularly was a necessity. He’d taken her sunken, bruise-circled eyes and shorn hair as the aesthetic choices of a woman trying to make it on her own and had suggested she take care buying ammo because some people didn’t know how to mind their own business around pretty women.

It hadn’t been difficult to convince him to meet her alone. She just wanted someone to teach her how to shoot her new gun, in case she needed to use it.

Men like him wanted to make a few bucks and tell themselves they were entrepreneurs, that they were just part of the great American system. She’d said she could pay him fifty dollars for a two hour lesson, and he’d said he’d do it for half if she was willing to let him buy her a coffee afterwards.

No one was going to miss him. He watches her as she rifles through the book of dates and dollar signs he’d had in his pocket, and he knows he sees an angry woman, a crazy woman, someone violent and dangerous. 

It’s hard to say if he’s the guy who sold the guns that killed her family. He sold mostly to and for the Irish, but it was clear from dealing with him even just twice that he’d work with anyone who had cash on hand. His notes don’t damn him and they don’t exonerate him and she’s not sure she’d be inclined to leave him alive even if they did. He’s the smallest of the cogs in the wheel of a machine that robbed her of everything, and she plans to crawl inside that machine and tear it apart.

Maria had never been an angry woman. 

She’d fought like the devil with Frank when he did some jackass thing, but she could flay Frank alive with a look, because he loved her the way she loved him. 

Frank though, Frank had been an angry man, though he never showed that anger to her; she saw it in the way he moved when he came home to her, saw it in his commendations, in his rising through the ranks. The system needed angry men, brutal men, stupid, obedient, willing men who would accept at face value that the men in charge had the best in mind.

Best for the world, best for their country, best for the men serving under them. 

Someone had wanted Frank erased, smudged off the face of the earth, and they’d decided to wipe his family out with him. Someone had put a DNR on Maria when she’d been in Mount Sinai, because whoever was left in charge had hoped to hell she’d die quiet. 

Maria was done being quiet.

Her head hurt, but not nearly so bad as her heart. 

Maria was not a professional killer, but neither, she thought, were the bodies behind the guns that had massacred her family. The people who’d killed her family were, officially, unknown men belonging to the Irish mob operating out of Hell’s Kitchen, supposedly targeting dealers from a Mexican cartel. The Castle family had merely been tragic casualties caught in the crossfire.

And yet someone put that DNR on her. 

Professionally, Maria has been many things, but what she’s always thought of herself most honestly as being was a sort of janitor. She cleaned other people’s messes. She kept structure and support. 

She pockets the little notebook, with its dates and its dollar amounts, and she shoots the man who sold her the gun in the head. She aims more carefully this time, and the choking stops immediately. The ever-present pain in Maria’s head does not ease until she finds his wallet and pulls out his ID. State ID, no driver’s license. Address in Brownsville.

It’s a start. Her chest still hurts, the knife pain through the middle of her unlikely to ever dull, but the pressure in her head seems to ease off just a little. She’ll have to do something about this gun; she doesn’t know enough about forensics to know how easily it could be tired to the slugs left in the man in the lawn chair. 

The man in the lawn chair worked for the Irish out of Hell’s Kitchen. Whether he sold them the guns that had been used in the park or not, he’d been one of them by extension. He’s the first scratch in the wound she plans to tear open in the city, the system, that’s robbed her. 

She does not regret killing him. She does regret that it took two shots, that he suffered the minutes of her indecision. 

You cannot make a mess to clear a mess. And while she may not be a professional cleaner, that doesn’t give her room to, as an amateur, botch the job so spectacularly.

In the future, she’ll do better.


End file.
